Not only does Daryna Mint Lite freeze, but so does Log Out, Switch User, Hibernate, and Restart in the Quit Menu. Lock Screen works fine and does allow messages to be sent. I've tried to to open a terminal and shutdown -h now and reboot, but Mint freezes still. This problem has not went away for months and have found no solution. This is a redo of a thread to try to attempt to get this resolved. Here is what I have tried:

1. I checked the wiki: http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... d_problems. It says to add one of these items or some combination of them to my kernel line in menu.lst. I was only able to add one at the end, because two never showed up at boot time when the kernel line displays. None of them worked.

2. I've tried reinstalling several times, but got the one time it shutdown, it froze at restart.

I'm sorry to say it but by now an Intel 440 is a very old piece of hardware and on top of that a Savage video chip....It can be bad luck with the hardware - it's about time for it to break down I'm afraid

Husse wrote:I'm sorry to say it but by now an Intel 440 is a very old piece of hardware and on top of that a Savage video chip....It can be bad luck with the hardware - it's about time for it to break down I'm afraid

I'll take that as "I don't know". Anyone who actually does know, or even where to start looking, please let me know.

Husse wrote:I'm sorry to say it but by now an Intel 440 is a very old piece of hardware and on top of that a Savage video chip....It can be bad luck with the hardware - it's about time for it to break down I'm afraid

If it's my hardware, then why does Suse, Mandriva, and Sabian have zero shutdown problems on this same machine?

Jordan, have you tried Ubuntu yet? If you have, and you suffer with the same shutdown issue, then it is an Ubuntu-related problem. So, many times, Mint is going to suffer from the same problems, though not always. If you have the time, you may wish to test and research this theory. The Ubuntu forums are a great place to do some in-depth investigation. From what I have seen many times in the past, your hardware will determine what distro it wants to run no matter how hard you fuss and cuss.

If Mandriva and openSUSE work with no problems, then by all means, your hardware may be giving you suggestions for a preference. I have used both of these distros previously, and both were fine choices. You would have a solid distro no matter upon which one you and your hardware decide. Also, you may wish to consider PCLinuxOS, which is based on Mandriva. All three of these distros have active and helpful forums, so you may wish to peruse through them for any tips or tricks.

On a side note, I have seen this type of freezing behavior previously with a machine where the owner somehow had disabled the Power management daemon (Preferences>Sessions>Startup Programs). Once it was enabled, everything worked normally again. While this may not be your problem, it may be something you might wish to verify.

While I know we all would love to see you having a wonderful Mint experience, the reality is that it is not always the case. Though, on the bright side, there is a perfect Linux distro awaiting you. Good luck, and have fun.

I have been giving this issue some time on this particular install. At first, it froze up every shutdown. It appears to be freezing only half the time now. Here are a few things I've noticed that may or may be helpful info regarding this issue.

When it does freeze for a shutdown, I believe the OS may be shutting down, but just not the machine. I've noticed that when I hard shutdown I'll let up before it forces the machine off. A second or two later I hear a familiar barely noticeable tink my machines makes when shutdown goes normally. This is the time during verbose shutdown when it says stopping all processes or something like that, and when those process are done I always hear the tink and the lights on my laptop cascade to a halt and the power quits. At this point I hold the power button down and force the machine off. I haven't got safe mode and the need to run fsck at the next boot with this method.

When I shutdown by pulling the power cord it has increased the chance fsck has needed to be called at the next boot. I guess this is due to a write operation occurring and now avoid doing that, although I thought journalling in ext3 handled this.

I also noticed if I install Mint on an ext2 format on this machine, it tends to boot into safe mode and will not init 5 until fsck is performed and errors are corrected. I had to reformat it to ext3 to get things working properly. Perhaps this was a journaling issue, since I see that as the significant change.

Another thing I noticed was that if I install mint on a partition toward the end of my hard drive it tends to increase it's problematic behavior: random freezing during use/refuse to boot/boot into safe mode.